As The Galloway Hoard – Viking-Age Treasure enters its final weeks at Aberdeen Art Gallery, Museum Assistant Dr Tim Carlisle shares his passion for Viking archaeology and history. In today’s blog he asks who are the Vikings and what is the Viking Age?
The Galloway Hoard brings together the richest collection of rare and unique Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland. Buried around AD 900, the Hoard is of international significance and is transforming our understanding of this period of Scottish history. It contains over 100 diverse objects, from silver, gold and jewelled treasures to rarely-surviving textiles, including wool, linen and Scotland’s earliest examples of silk.
When it was first found in 2014, the Galloway hoard was described as a new “Viking” hoard, but as experts from National Museums Scotland and partner organisations learned more about the objects in the Hoard, it turns out that there is not much that is Viking about it. Research has shown that only one or two objects from the Hoard show a direct Viking connection, and it was probably buried by people native to the Galloway area in South-West Scotland. It is more appropriate to describe it as a “Viking-age” hoard. But just what exactly is a Viking and what do we mean by the Viking Age?
The term “Viking” is somehow both simple and complex. What do we mean when we describe something as “Viking”? How did the Vikings have such a dramatic influence on the northern world? And why does it have such a grip on our imaginations?
The Viking Age is a modern term for describing a period of history roughly covering the end of the 700s to the early 1000s. During this time the Vikings, who were broadly Scandinavian, spread across the northern world. Their influence dramatically shaped the socio-political landscape of everywhere they made landfall, from Great Britain and Ireland, to Russia and the Middle East.
The origins of the term Viking are still the subject of debate but, the consensus is that “a Viking” was a maritime raider or a pirate. The word vikinger or vikingar, is used in modern Nordic languages to refer specifically to sea raiders. One could also use Viking as a verb, an activity, to “go Viking”, or to go raiding. Therefore, a Viking was someone who went Viking. It was an occupation, activity, and identifier within society. One could be a part-time or retired Viking, only raiding in the spring and summer, then farming in the off season. It is only later that we start to see professional Vikings, either as long-term raiders or as mercenaries, turning their talent for violence into a full-time occupation.
Viking in a more general sense, as in a Viking sword or a Viking ship, or the Viking Age has come to mean anything connected to Scandinavian activities generally between the 700s and 1000s. Sometimes it refers to the direct influence or origins of an object, and sometimes it is tangential, such as a silk hood that arrived in Britain through Viking trade routes.
The association with raiding is a poor way of describing an entire cultural group, however, Viking has come to be the primary term in the public imagination. However, we see immense levels of complexity and personality in the Viking presence in the past. One could say that Viking history and archaeology is typically, a-typical. We can usually identify a distinct Viking signature, but there is always something unique about the objects and their contexts, reflecting the complexity of the Vikings themselves. Even describing ‘the Vikings’ can be problematic, because not all Viking-age people were in fact Vikings, from a Nordic background, or even from Scandinavia. It is becoming more and more clear that even the lives of Viking-age Scandinavian farmers who never participated in a raid, or communities along coastal trade routes, were still connected to the wider Viking phenomenon.
Much of this discussion equates to linguistic nit-picking. However, understanding the difference and association adds more complexity to the conversation about the people of the past. You could have a person from Viking-age/ late Iron-age Scandinavia who never went on a raid, who was not a Viking. You could have a raider, for all intents and purposes a Viking, who was not from Scandinavia.
We know from studies of Viking graves around Europe that Viking crews and society were a diverse group, with DNA signatures from all around the Northern world. If we assume this meant that the remaining Viking demographic was equally diverse, Viking society must have been a melting pot of traditions, languages, and lifestyles drawn from the people they contacted, enslaved, or settled alongside, including in Galloway.
In a way there was no such thing as a pure Viking culture, rather a complex web of style and interpretation falling under the umbrella of ‘Viking’, which perhaps had distant origins in the Scandinavian homelands. In both cases the Viking-Age and Viking society was in fact more fascinating and complex than simply having a Norse association. We should keep this in mind as we continue to explore Viking-age life. While the use of Viking as a general term may remain, we can better understand what it means to define the Galloway Hoard as a Viking-age treasure.
While there is limited evidence of direct Viking connection, the objects included in the Galloway Hoard seem to bear out the wider connections to the Viking-age and the cultural changes that were occurring in the Northern world in connection to Viking activity.
Read Tim's Blog: https://buildingmidgard.wordpress.com/
